Electrochemical sensors are known and can be used to detect various types of gases including oxygen as well as toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. Representative sensors have been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,668,302 to Finbow et al. entitled “Electrochemical Gas Sensor Assembly”, issued Sep. 16, 1997, and U.S. Patent Application No. 2010/0252455 published Oct. 7, 2010 and entitled “Methods of Operation of Electrochemical Gas Sensors”. Both the '302 patent and the '455 application are commonly owned with the present application and are incorporated herein by reference.
It is advantageous to provide means of performing diagnostic tests of various types on electrochemical gas sensors to detect such effects as end of life, change in electrolyte concentration, incorrect/faulty operation, etc. Currently such tests are often performed by modulating the sensing electrode and monitoring the resulting signal. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,251,243 describes a method by which the transient signal resulting from a perturbation to the sensing electrode is used to determine if the sensor is operating correctly.
EP 2327981 describes a technique whereby the sensing electrode signal is interrupted to generate a diagnostic. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,558,752 and 6,096,186 describes a means whereby the sensing electrode potential is scanned to measure electrode activity. Methods such as those described above all potentially suffer from the disadvantage that by perturbing the sensing electrode the sensor may be out of operation for the duration of the test and also may require considerable time (in some cases many hours) to recover back to normal operation following the test. Furthermore, due to the high surface area of typical gas diffusion electrodes any such tests (e.g. scanning voltammetry) need to be performed relatively slowly. This again may result in the sensor being out of use for several hours. As a result such tests can only be performed infrequently, or when the sensor is not in use. For many applications, however, it is desirable to be able to carry out diagnostics much more rapidly and/or frequently.